EU regulations determined the mobility of cucumbers according to their physical characteristics.
Centre Canadien d'Architecture, Montréal

Hey there! Hello, this is your Art Agenda speaking. I know it's been awhile, but I'll try and stay on top of things arty in the city so you can get back the the great business of looking at them.

Photo credits: © Paul Litherland, 2011

This week, art agenda is brought to you by Valentine's day and all those other days of the post-love week. What better thematic for this than women cutting things up? Ok so it's not all literal, scissor-type cutting, but its all based in the radical rearrangement and juxtaposition of ideas and imagery.

First-up, Sophie Jodoin's dark collages at Oboro You have to kill a whole to get a little are only on for one more week. I dislike the heaviness of the text surrounding this exhibition, which seems more interested in validating the subject matter of the work than in the medium or execution; I don't think there needs to be any special justification for an artist dealing with a dark subject, even one as dark as war. Isn't that what art has always done? I'm more interested in the collage, that exciting and violent medium of cutting things up, and I am especially interested that this work in being shown at Oboro, an artist-run center focused on new media.

Visiting us from the commercial gallery world is Susi Brister's exhibit Menagerie at Parisian Laundry. The images depict bodies in "natural" landscapes wrapped up in different varieties of "fake nature" be it fake fur or leaf printed fabric. My curiosity is peaked, are the bodies part of nature, are they hiding from it or are they trying to mimic the natural world?
image courtesy of Parisian Laundry

Last, but not the least talked about is the current CCA show Journeys: How travelling fruit, ideas and buildings rearrange our environment. If I understand the premise correctly, it's a show about the migration of environment, both physical and otherwise. The programming at the CCA is usually impressive, their exhibits leave you wanting more (my only complaint is that they could be bigger!!). Kudos to head curator Giovanna Borasi, who yet again gets me excited about "architecture".